MyMAP requires posting of midterm grades

Phase 1 of MyMAP, or My Monitoring Academic Progress, rolled out this semester and requires faculty to give progress reports every four weeks to first-time-in-college students, JoCarol Fabianke, interim vice chancellor for academic success, said Tuesday.

She said the initiative is being tested on first-time-in-college students this semester to see how the system works.

“We’re only doing the first-time-in-college students this semester because we want to make sure that our process works and the system works as it’s been put together. We’ve probably got between 9,000-10,000 FTICs, and each one of those FTICs is taking probably somewhere between two and five classes. So that’s kind of our pilot to see how it’s going to work,” Fabianke said.

Fabianke said faculty receive a list of first-time-in-college students from Banner and are asked to submit grades and record attendance for those students to see if they are at risk of failing the course.

She said if a student is at risk, an email is sent to the student asking them to meet with their instructor.

“A lot of faculty do that anyways,” Fabianke said.

Teams from all the Alamo Colleges including advisers, faculty, deans, information technology services staff, financial aid staff and district employees, developed the system to improve student success.

Fabianke said for spring 2013, this progress tracking will be expanded to every student in every course.

She said the next phase in the spring will be to gather all reports for one student in an accumulative report and figure out what the problem is if a student is getting multiple reports from multiple instructors.

“Then we want to maybe have a process for the student services people to contact you kind of as a second phase,” Fabianke said. “Each of the colleges has been doing some kind of early alert, but it’s not been linked with Banner and it’s not been in a way that we could do any kind of cumulative report about actions on students. So this is just kind of to be a little more comprehensive.”

She said this semester, after one of the periods has passed and faculty submit their reports, then the report will go to the department chairs.

“It is really just for the department chairs to be able, maybe, to say to a faculty member, ‘Well, you had 30 FTICs and you didn’t even have one at risk,’ to kind of try to prompt to make sure everyone’s doing this,” Fabianke said.

She said she understands faculty will have to get used to submitting the progress reports.

“This is really all to help students and so it may take awhile, and we’re going to have to reinforce this and talk about what it might do for students. And this is not about anything punitive. This is to encourage faculty to be sure to provide the information to the students,” Fabianke said.

MyMAP used to be called the Comprehensive Advising and Monitoring System plan, or CAMS, which was developed in the spring and summer of 2011.

Phase 1 of MyMap this semester also includes Smart Start, which instructed faculty to drop students who do not attend a class at least once during the first week of the semester, she said.

District Procedure F.6.1.5 states that if a student misses at least one session during the first week of class, the student will be dropped from that class. The procedure was approved July 26, 2011.

Fabianke said Phase 2 of MyMAP will roll out in the spring where incoming students will have to complete mandatory modules online before they are officially admitted in the district.

Modules include “Introduction to College and Pathways,” “Admissions Process,” “Paying for College,” “I-CARE,” “Assesment Information,” and “Test Prep.”

She said other pieces of MyMAP will be developed and tested, but it will take time to get them in place.

“We’ll probably, I would imagine, be working on this for at least a couple of more years, for different pieces of it,” she said.